"NASA simply cannot afford to do everything on its plate today," he told a hearing of the House of Representative's Committee on Science.

A victim of the government's runaway budget deficit, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the past few years has had to scrap or delay a number of scientific research programs to fund a replacement for the space shuttle -- the "Crew Exploration Vehicle," or CEV.

If all goes according to plan, the CEV should take to space in 2012, two years after the shuttle program finishes building the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) and is retired forever.

"Let me be clear," Griffin told lawmakers, "the primary objective for the next several years is to developp a new vehicule for lower orbit and beyond, following the orderly retirement of the space shuttle."

"This is absolutely essential if we wish to maintain our leadership's goal of space exploration," he stressed.

Besides scrapping biological research programs in space, NASA has also frozen research on nuclear technology to power up future bases on the moon.

NASA, said Griffin, follows the tried principle of working within available budget limits, adding that it was the only way of meeting the goals of space exploration -- referred to as the Vision -- President George W. Bush set in January 2004.

In addition to returning to the Moon, Bush also set a long-term goal of sending a manned mission to Mars.

Some lawmakers from the Republican majority and the Democratic opposition on the science committee were skeptical of the White House budget formula to finance its ambitious vision of space exploration.

"There is simply not enough money in NASA's budget to carry out all the tasks it's undertaking on the current schedule," said committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert, a Republican for New York.

"The estimated shorfall between now and fiscal 2010 is probably between four and six billion" dollars, he added.

For fiscal 2006, which began October 1, NASA's budget is 16.45 billion dollars, of which 4.5 billion are earmarked for three shuttle flights and 1.6 billion for the ISS.

The committee's top Democrat Bart Gordon was also doubtful: "I fear that the approach being taken by this administration to move the Vision forward over the near term may make it very difficult to sustain the initiative beyond 2008."

"My intention ... is not to criticize Administrator Griffin. Rather, it's to make clear that only 21 months into the Vision, NASA has already had to make major cuts to programs and contemplates additional restructuring simply to have the hope of meeting the president's timetable for returning US astronauts to the Moon," Gordon added.

Griffin also reiterated that NASA expected to resume shuttle flights in May 2006, once engineers have clearly understood what caused a chunk of insulation material to break off and fall from the Discovery's external fuel tank when it took off in July.

The Discovery flight was the first shuttle mission since the February 2003 Columbia catastrophe that killed seven astronauts on reentry and was caused by a falling piece of insulation that gouged the protective thermal shell of the shuttle on takeoff.

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